Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump - the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

American democracy was never supposed to give the nation a president like Donald Trump. We have never had a president who gave rise to such widespread alarm about his lack of commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, and to the need for basic knowledge about how government works. We have never had a president who raises profound questions about his basic competence and his psychological capacity to take on the most challenging political office in the world.

Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy

With Barack Obama's historic election in 2008, pundits proclaimed the Republicans as dead as the Whigs of yesteryear. Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and Chris Jankowski, began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks - known to political insiders as "ratf**king" - to a whole new unprecedented level.

Amazon Customer says:"Skip around; it's vital reading, but may be too much for some"

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

Mike Lofgren is back with a book perfectly pitched for the frenzied circus of the primaries. His argument this time is that for all of the backstabbing and money grubbing of the campaign season, the politicians we elect have as little ability to shift policy as Communist party apparatchiks. Welcome to Mike Lofgren's Washington, DC - a This Town where the political theater that is endlessly tweeted and blogged about has nothing to do with actual decision making.

The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains

While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery - our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover. Dopamine is the "reward" neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the "contentment" neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don't need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression.

The Making of Donald Trump

The culmination of nearly 30 years of reporting on Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston takes a revealingly close look at the mogul's rise to power and prominence. Covering the long arc of Trump's career, Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, New York, would become an entirely new and complex breed of public figure. Trump is a man of great media savvy, entrepreneurial spirit, and political clout. Yet, his career has been plagued by legal troubles and mounting controversy

The Panama Papers: How the World's Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

Late one evening investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data. Through encrypted channels he then receives documents showing a mysterious bank transfer for $500 million in gold. This is just the beginning. Obermayer and fellow Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in a secret world where complex networks of shell companies help to hide people who don't want to be found.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump's vision - a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on "radical Islamic terrorism", and sweeping aside climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy - will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks to the economy, to national security, to the environment.

In 1980, US capitalist politics wore a "nice-guy mask", a troubling disguise to cover up a creeping despotism in which the ultra-rich and corporate overseers were merging with a centralized state power in order to manage the populace. This immanent corporate authoritarianism threatened to subvert constitutional democracy.

Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few

In Saving Capitalism, Robert Reich reveals the entrenched cycles of power and influence that have damaged American capitalism, perpetuating a new oligarchy in which the 1 percent get ever richer and the rest - middle and working class alike - lose ever more economic agency, making for the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity since World War II.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. The rules, policies, and institutions that have guided the world since World War II have largely run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order in an age defined by global challenges from terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to climate change and cyberspace. Meanwhile, great power rivalry is returning. Weak states pose problems just as confounding as strong ones.

Dwayne Eberlein says:"I look at the world politic and how we got here"

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

The author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine began his research into the agency's activities when CIA director William Colby gave him free access to interview agency officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would eventually rescind it and made every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented an elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty

Like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of the modern age, but they have never been the subject of a major biography... until now. Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. "You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money," Fred Koch cautioned. "It may either be a blessing or a curse."

The Retreat of Western Liberalism

In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of liberal democracy - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a terrifying symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability.

Am I Being Too Subtle?: The Adventures of a Business Maverick

Self-made billionaire Sam Zell consistently sees what others don't. From finding a market for overpriced Playboy magazines among his junior high classmates, to buying real estate on the cheap after a market crash, to investing in often unglamorous industries with long-term value, Zell acts boldly on supply and demand trends to grab the first-mover advantage. And he can find opportunity virtually anywhere - from an arcane piece of legislation to a desert meeting in Abu Dhabi.

Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics

In today's post-truth political landscape, there is a carefully concealed but ever-growing industry of organized misinformation that exists to create and disseminate lies in the service of political agendas. Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America present a revelatory history of this industry - which they've dubbed Lies, Incorporated - and show how it has crippled legislative progress on issues including tobacco regulation, public health care, climate change, gun control, immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage.

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign - the candidate herself.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the 20th century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? Through meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance—and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs.

Publisher's Summary

There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but in the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Alarmingly, the greatest income gap is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but within the wealthiest 1 percent of our nation - as the merely wealthy are left behind by the rapidly expanding fortunes of the new global super-rich. Forget the 1 percent; Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at break-neck speed.

What's changed is more than numbers. Today, most colossal fortunes are new, not inherited - amassed by perceptive businessmen who see themselves as deserving victors in a cut-throat international competition. As a transglobal class of successful professionals, today's self-made oligarchs often feel they have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Bringing together the economics and psychology of these new super-rich, Plutocrats puts us inside a league very much of its own, with its own rules.

The closest mirror to our own time is the late 19th century Gilded Age - the era of powerful "robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Then as now, emerging markets and innovative technologies collided to produce unprecedented wealth for more people than ever in human history. Yet those at the very top benefited far more than others - and from this pinnacle they exercised immense and unchecked power in their countries. Today's closest analogue to these robber barons can be found in the turbulent economies of India, Brazil, and China, all home to ferocious market competition and political turmoil. But wealth, corruption, and populism are no longer constrained by national borders, so this new Gilded Age is already transforming the economics of the West as well. Plutocrats demonstrates how social upheavals generated by the first Gilded Age may pale in comparison to what is in store for us, as the wealth of the entire globalized world is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Cracking open the tight-knit world of the new global super-rich is Chrystia Freeland, an acclaimed business journalist who has spent nearly two decades reporting on the new transglobal elite. She parses an internal Citigroup memo that urges clients to design portfolios around the international "Plutonomy" and not the national “rest”; follows Russian, Mexican, and Indian oligarchs during the privatization boom as they manipulate the levers of power to commandeer their local economies; breaks down the gender divide between the vast female-managed "middle class" and the world's one thousand billionaires; shows how, by controlling both the economic and political institutions of their nation, the richest members of China's National People's Congress have amassed more wealth than every branch of American government combined - the president, his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress.

Though the results can be shocking, Freeland dissects the lives of the world's wealthiest individuals with empathy, intelligence, and deep insight. Intelligently written, powerfully researched, and propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour-de-force of social and economic history, and the definitive examination of inequality in our time.

What made the experience of listening to Plutocrats the most enjoyable?

Freeland offers an interesting opportunity to see and to experience the worldview of the super rich and the ultra influential both past and present. As the influence of the uber wealthy increases and the world's plutocrats increasingly answer to nobody beyond their inner circle, this book proves particularly timely.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Ryan has a nice voice, but her frequent mispronunciations detracted from her narration and made me question whether or not she understood what she was reading. I would imagine that the job of a narrator would include learning the meanings and correct pronunciations of any unfamiliar words.

You may note a three-star rating for "overall' and four-star rating for "story' -- which may seem a bit backward. Well ...the stories of the world's plutocrats are interesting ...but ...the analysis is ...well, maybe it is me. Maybe I just do not understand the terminology being used. I am not a Harvard educated entitled elite -- I attended Rutgers University and the University of Minnesota. And maybe that is why I have a "normal" person's understanding of certain words -- like "liberalization."To me, "liberal" refers to left leaning policies that lean toward socialism and away from free-market and business-positive policies. However, that is not how "liberalization" is used in this book. Also, the author has spent decades reporting on the plutocrats, even attending some of the same meetings and conferences they attend. I think she identifies herself as one of them, to some degree, because she enjoys some of the same perks they do.So, I find her analysis of the situation a bit "off" -- or so it seems to me.Thankfully I had already listened to other books that touch on subjects mentioned here, so I wasn't lost when they were brought up and also could wonder at her analysis that seemed unaware of these other aspects of the events she refers to. One such book I would recommend is How I Caused the Credit Crunch -- An Insider's Story of the Financial Meltdown by Tetsuya Ishikawa (who worked for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and ABN AMRO); it describes quite well the truly weird financial instruments and the huge bonuses financiers were making on their sale that led to the financial melt-down -- an understanding one probably needs to understand the basis for the wealth of the lower portion of the 1% ... the so-called "working rich" Freeland refers to in PLUTOCRATS.And a second negative -- not just of the book but of how many people (economists, at least, talk this way) think -- is the idea that making people "richer" or that increasing their income is actually a measure of progress. Well, I did not state that properly. I mean, to compare the daily wage of someone in China in dollars with an American factory worker's daily wage -- is stupid. Yes, I agree that a daily income of about $2 versus whatever an American makes a day is hugely disparate. But a more honest indicator would be an indication of the daily wage set against a cost-of-living index. Give me those kinds of stats to make your point. Don't just tell me you are making people richer. Though it is a novel, the second or third of Tarquin Hall's "Vish Puri" novels will tell you about the disparity the new wealth is causing -- and imply that this new wealth is causing inflation of prices and introduction of products most Indians cannot afford, and statistics comparing the median income against cost of living just might show that the "making people richer" line is perhaps not true ... ?Now, having given you my "negative" views -- I do recommend the book, but only if set among other books on similar topics and subjects for a broader view of the analysis. I did learn a lot, though, about how Plutocrats think, where they've come from and some of their influence. Therefore, I do recommend this book with slight reservation. :-)

The narrator is very good except for a few words that were mispronounced. Overall, the narrator does an excellent job.

I purchased this book because I saw Chrystia doing an interview about the topic. Starts with a survey of plutocrats in the past to establish a basis for comparison but quickly devolves into an apologist's vantage of plutocrats and oligarchs, a trend that continues past half the book. I was a bit discouraged with the tone, but I decided to finish it. She finally returned to the tone I expected, albeit more politically correct and nuanced treatment than I would have liked.

As I listened to the audiobook version, I'll mention that the narrator did a good job reading the material, notwithstanding the mispronunciation of several words, most notably "specious" and employing the rendering of "conservatorship" with a long A vowel sound; this, whilst technically correct is awkward and uncommon, so perhaps an overly pedantic choice over the more typical pronunciation with a short A or schwa sound."

“Plutocrats” is one of the most appropriate books of the 2012 area. It deeply reveals the inequalities in our society. Far from been a critic of plutocracy, I find the book to be more of a window into the world of plutocrats. I couldn’t say that I’ve learned how to become wealthy in this book but, I can definitely say that it increased my understanding of their bubble. I would have loved Chrystia to talk a little bit about her and how she got access to all the plutocrats she interviewed.

A must read for anyone interested in the world view global super-elite that's changing our world to suit their needs with no awareness of how it affects the rest of us.Well written and wonderfully read.

The Narrator had a very easy listening voice. she delivered the material well and kept a nice even tone. Narrator's tone had a good balance of not being to high or low. Some of the material in here can be dense at times, but overall the delivery made it easy to digest.

The book's content could be interesting, it's well written, but the narration is so annoying and dull, I could not listen to it. If you want to know what is inside this book, read it, don't buy the audio version.